Video Streaming Platform (FFmpeg + HLS/DASH + CDN + React + Node.js) overview

A video streaming architecture: FFmpeg handles transcoding of uploaded video into adaptive bitrate HLS or DASH segments, a CDN distributes those segments globally with low latency, React provides the player UI with adaptive quality switching, and Node.js with Express serves the API layer for metadata, authentication, and upload management. The ingest pipeline accepts raw video uploads to S3-compatible storage, triggers FFmpeg transcoding jobs that produce multiple quality variants, and writes manifest files (m3u8 for HLS, mpd for DASH) that reference the segmented output. Redis caches video metadata and viewer session state. PostgreSQL stores catalog data, user profiles, and analytics events. This stack suits VOD platforms, course hosting, live streaming services, and any product where video is a primary content type. The main tradeoff is high compute cost for transcoding and significant CDN bandwidth expenses at scale.